MANOWAR Frontman Talks About 'Gods Of War' Concept

Roy Kristensen of Imhotep webzine recently conducted an interview with MANOWAR frontman Eric Adams. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

On his performance on the new MANOWAR album, "Gods of War":

"I put 110 % into each and every track. I have to do that. I mean, I wouldn't like Karl, Scott or Joey to put less than 100 % of their feelings into the song, so… You know, the album is a concept album and we have to give everything from the very beginning to the last note, and the intensity has to be top notch in every single track. 'Blood Brothers' deals with two brothers, and when you're brothers you do what you have to do to that person no matter what. No questions asked. Then to do a song like 'Gods of War' which is way more aggressive, you know. You have to be just as intense, though in different ways. If you go the closer 'Hymn of the Immortal Warriors', the beginning of that track is very silent, talking about when the immortal warriors are dying. And, at the end everyone rises and goes to Valhalla. Then the song is bigger and more powerful with the choir singing with me!"

On the recording process for "Gods of War":

"We record everything separately. So, when I get down there everything is normally recorded and I work my way from there. When I'm in there, there's only Joey and me while the other guys are in another room. We talk about the lyrics and Joey pushes me until I am that person, I am that man. So, 'roll the tape, let's go, let's go!' Joey inspires me to do my very best, and from there we just do it again and again until everybody in the band is satisfied with the way it sounds. That's the way we work with anybody who's involved in our production. You know, when Scott plays, there are four drummers in the band, when Karl plays there are four guitar players… Every one of us knows which buttons to push in order to make the rest of the guys to do the very best."

On whether MANOWAR is a democracy when it comes to songwriting:

"Well, we're a band and we have to agree on certain matters. Like, if one of us doesn't think that something belongs in MANOWAR, then we have to discuss it and we probably end up not using it. It simply has to feel 100% right. As a matter of fact, let me tell you that there are songs that are written, recorded and done but which aren't on the album because they didn't fit the whole concept. They were put on the shelf for another album. They're great tracks, otherwise we wouldn't have recorded them, but the time was not right. Of course they could've been added to the 'Gods of War' album, but how many bonus tracks can you have?"

On the concept behind "Gods of War":

"Well, the whole idea came up when Karl was hit by his accident. We thought, 'What the hell are we gonna do now? We gotta come up with something special to the fans, something big, massive, something new and fresh and very special.' So that's when the idea behind 'Gods of War' was born, to write about different mythological gods. We could pick countries along the road, and sing about different gods which belong to different countries. We thought that this could work and the more we discussed it, the bigger the idea became. In America, when we study mythology, Odin is the first person we talk about, we talk about the whole Nordic mythology. You know, thousands and thousands of books have been written about the subject, movies have been made, but this is the first time a whole metal album has been dedicated to the Nordic Gods, so we thought, 'What better place to start?' since this was material that we knew to a certain extent. And we've played up there, Finland, Sweden etc., and the crowds are just as crazy up there are elsewhere in the world. We felt that this was gonna be great, what we were going to do!"

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